Why Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine Won't Be on Blu-Ray

The recent release of season two of Star Trek: The Original Series included an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ...and it looked terrible. Because it was on blu-ray, my player didn't even attempt to upconvert it, so it looked worse than it did on DVD.

I wondered why since I knew that TNG and DS9 were both shot on film. 

Unfortunately, it turns out all of the film elements were converted to videotape before being run through postproduction.

I was looking through one of the old books I have, The Making of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and came across this explanation. What's really annoying is that even in 1994 (when the show began and this book was written), they were aware that high-definition was coming and still chose to go with the same process they'd started in 1987 with TNG.

Here's the initial explanation:

Every physical element of Deep Space Nine is shot on film, not videotape. However, that film is just a first step. As soon as it's printed, it's sent to Unitel Video, where it is transferred to D2 videotape. Then the film is put into storage and —provided no disasters occur while an episode is in postproduction—it never sees the light of day again.

This paragraph points to this footnote:

In the planning stages of The Next Generation, an important decision was made that still affects Deep Space Nine today. The choice Gene Roddenberry and the production team faced was whether to do the visual effects for the new series using film techniques or on video. Video effects were faster and less costly, but only worked on the television screen. Because of video's low resolution at the time, there would be no final negative print from which film versions of The Next Generation could be edited together for theatrical release in other countries.

Ultimately, the decision was made to go to video, and Deep Space Nine continues that process today. Thus, although the resolution of the visual effects is much higher today than was possible in 1987, there are no final film prints of any episode of either series, and the episodes cannot be rescanned at the higher resolution necessary for high-definition television broadcast in the future.

Theoretically, it would be possible to return to the original raw film and redo all the visual effects at higher resolution, but such a step would be the equivalent of putting the show through the complete postproduction process again. It will be much less expensive to wait for enhancement technology to be developed so the final video versions of Deep Space Nine episodes can be reprocessed rather than being remade.

So every episode of TNG and DS9 would have to be reconstructed from original film elements and every single special effect would have to be recreated and re-edited. By the time of DS9 they were doing digital touchups: fixing errors from the original footage, like removing boom mikes and touching up make-up effects, etc.

They would have to hope that detailed info was kept from the processing of every single episode and re-do that work. That's 178 episodes of TNG and 176 episodes of DS9. It would have to cost a fortune and take a huge amount of time to redo every one of them.

I wasn't a fan of Star Trek: Voyager, so I don't know if they improved the process during its run, but I'm guessing they didn't. I think Star Trek: Enterprise may have been worked at HD resolutions.

This incredibly naive idea that somehow "enhancement technology" will be invented that will allow them to take low resolution video elements and magically increase the quality to HD levels. (Yes, I know, on CSI shows they can magically take one pixel and find hundreds of pixels of data in it, but in the real world, the info just isn't there...) They could artificially increase the resolution, but to try to pass that off as HD content would be criminal.

With TNG, I can sort of excuse it. It was 1987 and they didn't know if the show was going to be a success ...and it was a syndicated show to boot, but by the time of DS9, they knew that it was short-sighted and still did it.